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AMD Catalyst For Linux On The "Blacklist Of Junk"

09-06-2012, 10:00 AM

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst For Linux On The "Blacklist Of Junk"

While the Catalyst Linux graphics driver was overhauled five years ago, not everyone is satisfied with the closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver. Here's some interesting comments by a prominent Linux developer and his less than stellar Catalyst experience...

Comment

The open source radeon and nouveau gallium drivers, as well as the open source Intel drivers should also qualify for this blacklist. The Intel drivers for Linux has worse OpenGL support than the Windows driver, especially GLSL. But it handles old style OpenGL fine and reasonable stability. Fglrx has very good features on paper, but generally fail to deliver. Fglrx has general GLSL and OpenCL stability issues, and has a semi-featured configuration utility. Its like a product which is almost ready for shipping, with a lot of potential but missing the final touch to make it a finished product. Compared to Intel (Linux), Fglrx has more support and does GLSL better, but the end user experience would depend on usage. But for modern OpenGL, Fglrx is still way better than Intel (Linux). The Radeon and Nouveau gallium drivers has still way worse OpenGL support than Fglrx, and has a very variable stability from release to release.

Michael:
This is just a suggestion, but it would be great if your reviews in the future could include more information regarding the frame rate and potential stuttering. Average frame rates is not everything, especially now as both Nvidia and AMD are adding boost which "only" improves the maximum frame rates which raises the average frame rate. And regarding stuttering, even the good Nvidia drivers does from time to time have a release with some X Server bugs which makes games lag, especially during a lot of IO events (e.g. mouse movement). An average frame measurement would not be able to detect these kinds of problems.

Comment

No.. it might have improved on newer cards but it still is quite terrible on my radeon 4200 with the latest version that will run. Works fine for 2d but texturing is wonky in wine... Mesa works fine however and even allows greater dx versions to be used than fglrx.

Comment

The open source radeon and nouveau gallium drivers, as well as the open source Intel drivers should also qualify for this blacklist.

just dont say such stupid stuff. you absolutate speed and feature set, thats retarded. there is more than this 2 categories out there.

So if you are a developer of a opengl 4.0 game or something yes you will stick this other drivers that do not work for you at all on this list. but thats not the only point how you can judge a driver.

They are more way more stable than the closed ones and they are free, and they are fast enough for 3d desktop. So for all people who not want to play under linux because there are anyway no high grafics opensource games, and even this source-engin2 games are that crappy 10 year old grafics quality that it will even run with the intel-igps...

so yes for commercial game developers you can maybe if you make really high quality (graphics wise) games blacklist this drivers, but for the 99% of the other people you cant.